‘‘FOR WANT OF A NAIL, THE SHOE WASlost,” the proverb begins. “For want of a plan, the pandemic was lost” should be where Lady Hallett’s Covid inquiry turns its gaze. Deeply enjoyable to the media though it is, with its spectacle of repeated “gotcha” moments as each official, spad or minister is questioned about obscure points long forgotten is not an effective route to finding out what went wrong in 2020.
To do that, the inquiry is going to need to look further back and do a root cause analysis. Before we enter into that, we should consider just why this is key. The lack of a proper plan for a pandemic is the distal cause of so many related harms that followed. What this tells us is instructive about the failings of the modern administrative state; and also an instructive criticism into how modern inquiries work. On the way, it happens to expose some failures of the academy, too.
I assumed, partially because I knew it had been “rehearsed”, that in early 2020 a rigorous pandemic plan existed. This also seemed quite reasonable: the SARS virus wasn’t that long ago, and Ebola was sporadically flaring up in Africa. Depending on who you
